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Biography of Harold Dwight Lasswell

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NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES H A R O L D D W I G H T L ASS W ELL 1902—1978 A Biographical Memoir by GA BRIEL A. ALMOND Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoir COPYRIGHT 1987 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES WASHINGTON D.C. HAROLD DWIGHT LASSWELL February 13, 1902-December 18, 1978 BY GABRIEL A. ALMOND AROLD D. LASSWELL ranks among the half dozen cre- Hative innovators in the social sciences in the twentieth century. Few would question that he was the most original and productive political scientist of his time. While still in his twenties and early thirties, he planned and carried out a re- search program demonstrating the importance of personal- ity, social structure, and culture in the explanation of political phenomena. In the course of that work he employed an array of methodologies that included clinical and other kinds of interviewing, content analysis, para-experimental tech- niques, and statistical measurement. It is noteworthy that two decades were to elapse before this kind of research program and methodology became the common property of a disci- pline that until then had been dominated by historical, legal, and philosophical methods. Lasswell was born in 1902 in Donnellson, Illinois (popu- lation ca. 300). His father was a Presbyterian clergyman, his mother, a teacher; an older brother died in childhood. His early family life was spent in small towns in Illinois and In- diana as his father moved from one pulpit to another, and it stressed intellectual and religious values. Although the re- gional milieu of his childhood and adolescence might suggest that Lasswell was raised in an intellectual backwater, in fact 249 250 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS it was an unusually rich environment. He was especially in- fluenced in adolescence by a physician uncle who was familiar with the works of Freud; by an English teacher in the Deca- tur, Illinois, high school he attended who introduced him to Karl Marx and Havelock Ellis; and by a brilliant young teacher of high school civics, William Cornell Casey, who later became a professor of sociology at Barnard College in Co- lumbia University. He excelled in high school, edited the school newspaper, gave the valedictory address at gradua- tion, and was awarded a scholarship to the University of Chi- cago after winning a competitive examination in modern his- tory and English. When Lasswell entered the University of Chicago in 1918—at age sixteen—the university was in the third decade of its remarkable growth. At a time when sociology as a cur- riculum did not yet exist at most universities, Chicago had a major department that was staffed by such gifted theorists and researchers as W. I. Thomas, Albion W. Small, and Rob- ert Park. Its philosophy department was dominated by real- ists and empiricists such as James Tufts and George Herbert Mead. Its economics department, in which Lasswell majored, included Jacob Viner, John M. Clark, Harry Alvin Millis, and Chester Wright. Its political science department was soon to begin its dramatic rise, but in Lasswell's undergraduate years the department was in transition with Henry Pratt Judson soon to retire, and Charles Edward Merriam in the wings. Lasswell was a member of a graduate cohort that included Robert Redfield, Louis Wirth, and Herbert Blumer. His graduate years in the Department of Political Science at Chicago coincided with the publication of Merriam's man- ifesto, The Present State of the Study of Politics, in 1921 and with Merriam's and Gosnell's survey study of nonvoting in Chicago (1924). In The Present State, Merriam proposed that two steps be taken to make the study of politics more scientific: (1) the HAROLD DWIGHT LASSWELL 251 exploration of the psychological and sociological bases of po- litical behavior, and (2) the introduction of quantification in the analysis of political phenomena. The nonvoting study was a demonstration of the uses of social-psychological hypoth- eses and quantitative methods in the explanation of political phenomena. It was a survey of the "political motives" of some 6,000 nonvoters in the Chicago mayoral election of 1923; individuals to be surveyed were selected by a "quota control" sampling procedure that was intended to match the census demographic distributions. In the immediate aftermath of this study and during Lasswell's graduate student days, Har- old Foote Gosnell (then a first-term assistant professor of po- litical science) conducted the first experimental study in po- litical science—and what may very well have been the first experimental study in the social sciences outside of psychol- ogy. This was a survey of the effects on voting of a nonpar- tisan mail canvass in Chicago that was intended to get out the vote in the national and local elections of 1924 and 1925. The experimental technique Gosnell devised was quite rig- orous: there were carefully matched experimental and con- trol groups, different stimuli were employed, and the results were analyzed with the most sophisticated statistical tech- niques then available. Reflecting the programmatic and com- parative vision of these researches, follow-up studies of vot- ing turnout were made by Gosnell in Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. While Harold Gosnell was chosen by Merriam to develop the statistical component of his early 1920s vision, it was Har- old Lasswell who was encouraged to develop the clinical, psy- chological, and sociological components. As a young gradu- ate student, Lasswell published an article in 1923 entitled "Chicago's Old First Ward,"1 and in collaboration with Mer- 1 National Municipal Review, 12:127-31. 252 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS riam he published another in 1924 on public opinion and public utility regulation.2 Merriam threw out two challenges to the brilliant and am- bitious young political scientist. The first came out of Mer- riam's wartime experience as chief American propagandist in Rome; the second arose from Merriam's interest in the char- acteristics of political leaders and the uses of the study of the abnormal and the psychopathological in explaining normal and typical behavior. Merriam's first interest—the impor- tance of morale, propaganda, and civic training in the expla- nation of political behavior—led to Lasswell's 1927 doctoral dissertation, Propaganda Technique in the World War, and ulti- mately to his invention of systematic content analysis and its uses in World War II. Merriam's second interest—the psy- chological and personality aspects of leadership and the uses of the abnormal in the explanation of the normal—led to a series of articles by Lasswell on political psychology and per- sonality in politics, culminating in his Psychopathology and Pol- itics. Lasswell's doctoral dissertation on propaganda in the 1914-1918 war was a systematic effort to place World War I propaganda experience in the context of a theory of politics. Although there was something of antiwar muckraking in its tone, it also had the marks of rigorous scholarship: careful operational definitions, specification of the techniques of propaganda, and the conditions that limit or facilitate their effectiveness. Lasswell had done field research in Europe for this study, interviewing scholars and governmental officials regarding aspects of the propaganda experience aiid the Great War. He also anticipated his later invention of content analysis in a simple quantitative study—"Prussian School- 2 "Current Public Opinion and the Public Service Commissions," in: Public Utility Regulation, ed. M. L. Cooke (New York: Ronald Press, 1924). HAROLD DWIGHT LASSWELL 253 books and International Amity"—which was carried out in connection with his dissertation. (In the study Lasswell counted and evaluated the significance of the references to national superiority, military glory, foreign inferiority, mili- tary heroes, and the like in textbooks approved by the Prus- sian Ministry of Education after the establishment of the Weimar Republic.)3 Lasswell was appointed assistant professor of political sci- ence at Chicago in 1926 and soon embarked on researches in political psychology. Papers that he published from 1925 to 1929 showed him to be engaged in a search of the litera- ture concerned with political psychology and political per- sonality. One paper published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1929 recommended that psychiatrists keep ade- quate personality records and make them available to bona fide researchers; another published in the American Political Science Review the same year argued the case for the use of data on mentally ill persons with some involvement in politics as one approach to the analysis of the relationship between personality and politics. This literature search and his con- cern with the improvement of psychiatric recordkeeping were incidental to the preparation and publication of Lass- well's extraordinary book, Psychopathology and Politics, which appeared in 1930 when he was twenty-eight. Lasswell's work in preparing the book was extensive. He had been granted a postdoctoral fellowship by the Social Sci- ence Research Council for 1927—1928 and spent most of that year in Berlin undergoing psychoanalysis at the hands of Theodor Reik, a student of Freud. There is a report that he made a presentation at a Freud seminar urging that psychi- atric records be kept in order to facilitate research. He also 3 "Prussian Schoolbooks and International Amity," Journal of Social Forces, 3(1925):718-22. 254 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS discussed these ideas with leading psychiatrists in Vienna and Berlin. In late 1928 and 1929 he consulted with the psychi- atric directors of the most important mental institutions on the eastern seaboard, tapping their memories of cases of pol- itician patients. With their permission he examined psychi- atric records at St.
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